The Best Social Media Sharing Plugins for WordPress

Social media has been integrated into every part of our internet experience. Whether you are viewing a video on YouTube or reading an article on CNN, you will see a section on the page that allows you to share content through social media services.

The reason websites promote social media sharing is because so much traffic can be generated from it. In my recent article “How To Leverage Social Media On Your Blog“, I pointed out that traffic from social media services is second only to traffic from search engines.

74% of marketers saw an increase in traffic after spending just 6 hours per week on social media

50% of Internet users are active on Facebook

52% of marketers have gained a customer through Facebook, and 35% have done so through Twitter

Google+ has the most visits per month at 1,203 million

Social media is growing in popularity with older populations

The reality for website owners in 2014 is that if you do not place social media sharing buttons on your website, you are less likely to have your content shared by others. This means you are leaving a lot of traffic and money on the table.

In this article, I would like to show you some great social media sharing plugins for WordPress that will allow your visitors to share your content with others.

We may be a bit biased, but we are pretty confident in saying that our very own social sharing plugin, Monarch, is on of the best social media plugins you will find anywhere. So if you are already an Elegant Themes Member, then I would recommend giving it a try!

What makes Monarch unique is it’s wide range of sharing locations and customizable triggers that you simply wont find in any other plugin. Monarch lets you display custom Pop-Ups and Fly-In boxes when your visitors are most engaged, such as when they are finished reading your post, which is guaranteed to increase your website’s sharing activity by leaps and bounds.

Monarch comes with a bunch of other goodies as well, such as a custom options interface that’s a breeze to use, and a detailed stats page that gives you the ability to observe and audit the plugin’s effectiveness.

You can see the plugin in action in the Elegant Themes blog right now. Check out the floating bar to the left hand side of this page 🙂

Founded way back in 2004, the AddThis service supports over three hundred social media services. The WordPress plugin allows you to choose from a variety of icon sizes and designs.

If you sign up to AddThis.com, you can also see analytical data on what people are sharing. While the plugin is free to use, there is a premium service available that costs $12 per month and features additional widgets and options, such as a floating media sharing bar.

With around two million downloads, AddThis is one of the most popular sharing plugins for WordPress.

Launched in 2005, ShareThis has been a big player in social media sharing for many years. The WordPress plugin offers a host of small and large social media icons and designs. Users can share your content in over one hundred and twenty services.

Analytical reports are also provided and there is a feature called CopyNShare that lets you track when a visitor copies your page URL.

The ShareThis service offers a lot of great features such as analytics, mobile support and the ability to track what visitors are copying and sharing.

Easy Social Share Buttons is a stylish sharing solution that is available from CodeCanyon for $12. It allows visitors to share content using one of eight social media services. Content can also be shared via email.

Several button designs are available, each of which displays the number of times a page has been shared. The buttons can be displayed in a variety of positions including the top and bottom of posts, sidebar and via a pop up.

Ultimate Social Deux is a new social media sharing solution that I have been testing on my blog. Also available from CodeCanyon for $12, it allows you to add social media buttons as a floating social media bar and the top and bottom of your content area.

The plugin allows you to change the color of buttons, however there is only one design available. One of the reasons I like the plugin is because it uses lightweight Javascript and CSS to ensure buttons load quickly.

Ultimate Social Deux is a fast sharing solution that uses light Javascript and CSS.

Known for years as Sexy Bookmarks, Shareaholic boasts many different layouts, sizes, themes and counter styles. The plugin provides reports on your sharing activity and can display related content to visitors.

If you are looking for something basic, check out Social Sharing by Danny. The plugin adds basic sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook and Google+. 16×16 or 32×32 pixel buttons can be selected and added to your posts automatically, via a shortcode or hard-coded into your templates using PHP.

Social Sharing by Danny is a simple solution that many of you will love.

At first glance, it looks like a basic solution that only adds sharing buttons to the top of your blog posts, however it has a few nice features. Rather than slowing down your page by loading official sharing buttons, the plugin displays fast loading icons. It will only load the official sharing buttons once a user hovers over an icon. This means that the plugin adds no weight to the initial page load (the technique is known as asynchronous loading).

Floating Social Bar supports five social media services.

Another nice feature is the ability to display sharing buttons at the top of the page once a user has scrolled down the page. It ensures that the buttons are displayed to visitors at all times.

Truth be told, I am trying to stop using Jetpack on my websites as the plugin has been known to slow down pages. There is, however, no denying the versatility of the plugin. Additionally, with around nine million downloads tracked on WordPress.org, the chances are that many of you have the plugin installed already. As such, you may want to consider using its sharing module.

The module gives you a lot of options on how visitors share your content. You can choose from ten popular social media services and print and email. Official sharing buttons can be displayed. Alternatively, if you want to improve the loading time of your pages, you can choose to show text links and/or icon images.

The social sharing module of Jetpack supports ten social media services, print and email.

I hope you enjoyed this look at social media sharing plugins. If so, I encourage you to subscribe to Elegant Themes for updates about our latest articles.

I apologize if your favorite social media service did not make the list. There are dozens out there to choose from, therefore I wanted to focus on a select few. Be sure to leave a comment and share with fellow readers your existing sharing solution as it will help us all find out about other great solutions 🙂

By Kevin Muldoon

Kevin is our resident tutorial master. He has years of experience with WordPress, and is a professional blogger with a special interest in social media, internet marketing and web design.

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My one big problem with the Floating Social Bar is that the Twitter and Pinterest buttons seem to add extra characters to the article title in replace of commas. Has anyone figured out how to fix this yet?

Megan
June 17, 2014

What comment system/plugin is this website using? Does anyone know? Thanks!

yeah, I’d be interested to know what you think. I previously used Flare but they discontinued updating it so I tried this instead. One post that was about 3 years old with around 700 FB likes has jumped to around 2500 likes since I started using this plugin just a few months ago.

I remember testing Flare when it first came out. It looked good and I used it temporarily on my blog, though I was not personally a fan of the way it worked.

However I did consider including it in my list regardless as I know it is popular. Unfortunately, as you point out, the plugin is no longer in development. They have switched to a hosted application service, therefore cannot really be included in a list of WordPress plugins.

If the list was about twenty or thirty plugins long, I’d probably have included it, however with only eight items, many plugins had to be excluded 🙂

Really dislike the floating share bar on the elegant themes blog. If viewing on a phone the bar covers the content (worse if you zoom in) so makes the content difficult to read. Would far prefer a fixed share bar top or bottom…

Ultimately, it is difficult to find a good solution that looks good on desktops and on mobile phones. Floating bars frequently look good on desktops. As you rightly point out, they rarely look good on mobiles due to everything being condensed.

I think the floating bar you have on here looks really great. The major downfall is that you don’t have any social share options when viewing in mobile. I was just looking at your site via mobile and wanted to tweet it out…and I couldn’t. 65% of our traffic is mobile and since our main mode of getting the word out is by allowing our readers to share our content, this would kill our PVs.

I am finding that many social media like social media feather are having a issue with my theme. I will look into the ones you have here. But I have a theme that is the issue and I can’t find away around it.

I want to ask you if you can tell me a social media plugin that has the ability to show the faces of the people you have friends on the Facebook page. I have a client who insist to add him this kind of social media plugin and I cannot find one! He wants to see the faces of the people he has in his FB site as friends, on the Facebook widget or something like that in his website.
He wants to see their FB profile picture!
Can you tell me which plugin can do that?

I’ve been using AddThis for a few years now and I have no complaints at all. There are a lot of resources out there for them too if you are wanting to customize certain aspects of the share / follow items. Great post Kevin!

I am actually in the same boat as you Jocelyn. I have disabled all of the modules except from WordPress.com stats and the sharing module for distributing posts to social media websites.

One of the problems of Jetpack is that they update it frequently with new modules and automatically enable them – this means that your page load can suddenly be higher because of a plugin you did not want or need.

Saying Jetpack adds bloat was not just a throwaway comment, however it had been some time since I had tested the load it added.

Therefore, I tested the speed of my blog with Jetpack enabled and Jetpack disabled. Disabling it only decreased http requests by one, but the page loading time dropped a little. Page loading times depend on a lot of factors so I tested it a number of times and saw it drop by around 0.60 seconds, then 0.10 seconds, then 0.20 seconds.

So with only two modules enabled, I usually had around 0.20 seconds added to my page load. Clearly, this was being caused by WordPress.com stats.

I recommend doing something similar. Test your page speed a few times with all your current modules enabled and then deactivate the plugin and test your page speed again a few times. This will give you an idea of the page load it is adding.

You can then look at which modules are causing the load and whether the pages are important to you or not.

I love these plugins because with the help of these plugins we can show the trust worthiness of our websites. A visitors can directly jumps to social media profiles and share his thoughts with these buttons. I like the last one most. Thanks for sharing this post with us.

I wrote yesterday and I was looking forward for a help but nobody answered me. So I’m trying once again… maybe this time i will be more lucky!
Is it anybody out there who knows how to put a facebook plugin that shows the faces of the people who like the website or the people that they are also friends to facebook page?
Pleeeease someone can give me an answer?

Kevin, I have both jetpack and sociable on my site. Is that duplicate effort? When I first loaded sociable it would automatically post my posts to FB and LinkedIN. Now it only goes to LinkedIN. Any ideas?

Thanks for the post – this made me revisit the whole thing. Thinking I should uninstall Sociable and Jetpack and try one of these others?

They both add a horizontal sharing bad so I would only use one of the plugins and not both. I recommend testing the speed of your website with both of the plugins disabled, with each enabled and then with both enabled. That will help you see exactly how much they are slowing down your website.

Geniusdigit
March 10, 2014

I am not into Social Media (maybe one day) but I have an opt-in list of people who have subscribed to my newsletter. Sometimes someone makes a comment on my blog and I am starting to have a conversation but cannot figure out what plugin to use to notify them when I reply to their comment. The same as here in this blog, I am subscribed to Elegant Themes new blog posts, but how do you notify me when someone responds to my question.

Thanks though for the blog post, great education about the Social Media sharing.

Nope… Here is their official stance: “Thanks for all the support of this idea! Google+ profiles are not currently available through their public API but we will continue to monitor the situation closely. Once Google releases this possibility, we’ll certainly look at integrating personal profiles.” (as of August 2103)

Jetpack can do post 2 both google profiles, but for some reason allows post only to one facebook profile – either fan page, or personal profile, but not both…

Looks like a mess… hence was the question. But thanks for taking time!

Speaking about HootSuite. It does all sorts of things that only malware does. The base product look grea but the way it creeps into my twitter and post on behalf of me 20 tweets in 3 days is extremely annoying.

I didn’t know that. I used it for a few websites in the past and didn’t have any major problems with it. The one problem I had was the featured image wasn’t working correctly, though I believe they have corrected that issue.

Excellent post. Well planned social media marketing can also boost business & play a huge role in the ability to thrive of online marketers. And powerful social media marketing methods . Anyway, excellent information.

This is a bit off topic but I wanted to thank you for writing about Vaultpress in one of your articles. It’s WONDERFUL.

I had wondered what was meant by restoring your database – like, was that everything?

Thanks to your article, I now understand that no, it isn’t. The database doesn’t include your images, plugins nor themes. And Vaultpress backs up ALL those things.

I also looked at my current backup solutions and saw that there was no support for restoring anything. I would have to hire someone. Vaultpress does that too. Total restore with a few clicks. I’m thrilled!

In my experience, all of the floating bars claim to work with responsive themes….but rarely look as good as they should. To be fair, it’s hard to make a lot of things work on mobile devices. Tablets are less of an issue.

Are you referring to displaying the image for post updates on services such as Facebook? If so, there are plugins available that set up your open graph data. WordPress SEO by Yoast, for example, includes options for this.

Hi I went ahead and purchased Ultimate Social Deux, thanks for the recommendation. Which floating social bar are you using on the left side of your page? If you are using Social Deux, that’s a very cool customization you did somehow.

WordPress is considered best CMS for develop a search engines’ friendly website for blogging or business purposes. It also provides variety of plugins which perform good job to add technical information and make your website interface search engines and users’ friendly. I already installed Ultimate Social Deux plugin on my blog which also inform me and visitors about total shares of a post. However, I am pretty happy to read about these social media sharing plugins of WP which make quite easy to share a post with single click 🙂

Absolute Beginner
March 29, 2014

What about Juiz Social Post Sharer ?
Free, many options, still updated, and very usefull 🙂

im using Yoast SEO Plugin on my site http://www.dailynewscompany.com but someone said that install Easy WP SEO Plugin for better results on same site, now my question is that can i use both on my site ?

Few months back, i installed sharaholic, but didn’t get any satisfaction. But now I am using Floating Social Bar and its working fine.. Anyways you didn’t enlist Digg Digg in your list.. any reason for that??

I have used Digg Digg in the past myself, however I always found it to be buggy. Though the main reason is that there are dozens of social media sharing plugins available, so I had to shorten my original list down for this article 🙂

Thanks for sharing the list, i use floating plugin and sharethis on most of the blogs. I prefer to use a free one rather than heading over to codecanyon for such a simple plugin. Anyways cheers for the list.

josh

Amy
April 27, 2014

Hi Kevin,

Do you need addThis installed along with the addThis Smart Layers plugin? I’m having trouble finding out where to customize it for placement, etc.

You can use them in conjunction if you wish. The AddThis floating buttons display at the side of your page, while the Jetpack buttons will display at the bottom. Though this will increase your loading time slightly.

I still keep Jetpack activated for publicize myself. It does not take up much resources if you deactivate all the modules you do not need. I have not looked for an alternative solution as I am happy with the way it works 🙂

Juan Pablo
April 28, 2014

Kevin, Plz help me.
I’m sweating bullets trying to configure the addthis smart layer in my website.
I only need a twitter, facebook, google+, linkedin, print, and more options with counters just like you at the left. Can you post the plugin code for a copy paste?
Thanks a lot!!!

thank you very much kevin! there are some plugins you mentioned , i never heard of them.There is a question .. if we use different plugin on our site, does they slow down site performance because every plugin use its own style sheet.

if you guys haven’t seen the new Riviton GoViral Facebook LIKE & SHARE plugin, you should check it out. Its shooting a lot of my content into the viral atmosphere on ViralFlood.com. Its by far more effective for now then all of these FB plugins. Check it our. Its called the “Riviton GoViral Facebook Like & Share Popup” its working miracles for me 🙂

I am currently using AddThis and dig dig, both seems to work fine till now.

Sheila
May 16, 2014

I don’t mean to be contrary, but when I go to WordPress.org and look at the reviews of the plugins that you have listed here, they seem to rate as 3 or 3.5 stars and have some really bad reviews. A common thread I’m seeing is that these plugins often have spyware or they can’t be uninstalled properly. What say you?

There is also a super handy popup plugin for WordPress that can seriously help some of your post to go viral.. it is called “Go Viral” I think is what it was called “Go Viral Popup Plugin” I think it is by Riviton or something like that, but I have seen this on ViralDoza, SFTimes.co, and many others. If you use WordPress and want your stuff to go viral, that plugin will work wonders…

Thanks for the great social sharing I am looking for a plugin that can show Twitter , facebook , Google Plus Follow Button as popup . I tried Social Popup Plugin to enable this to my blog but it is not working for me . I want a plugin that show all social site at once .

I’m still not able to decide which one is the best. I tried some of them but was not satisfied. Currently I’m using social sharing option provided by Jetpack. I think Sexy Bookmarks would be better for Posts. What do you say?

These plugins are good. Each of them has weak and good point. Your selection will largely depend on your preference, features desired.

I’ve used virtually all the plugins mentioned in this post as test run on my blog. Some like addthis, sharethis, shareholic are very rich in features but they don’t give vertical float I desired.

There is speed issue with some of them like Dig Dig. If not for speed, the latter should have been my choice. Flare is awesome, I left it because it is no more supported and I cherish update availability.

I eventually installed Dig Dig alternative. The speed is fair and the display is good as well. Jetpack social share makes my horizontal social sharing. The downside of the Jetpack is positional limitation at the end of posts.

Hi,
I’ve seen people add social plugin in there wordpress code. This helps admin to add anywhere they like.
Where to find the code to add to single post page. So for multiple sites this becomes easy process by adding the code in wordpress zip file prior to uploading site.
Thanks.

Steve
June 14, 2014

Hi,

Do you have a recommendation where posts / replies on FB flow to a worpress site?

Very helpful! I had ‘Really simple Facebook and Twitter share’ plug-in installed from day one as recommended. While my blog was under construction, I accidentally liked one of my blog posts on my phone and after a few minutes, was surprised that someone on my Facebook commented on this activity! I was horrified because I didn’t think it would appear in my FB account since there was no ‘permission to share on FB pop-up’ screen. After then I deactivated it and will now use one of the above mentioned as my sharing tool instead! Thank you 🙂

Hello Kevin,
You save me from a great danger. I am a newbie blogger. I .got a little bit of traffic in last two days. But my social media sharing buttons are not working. I don’t know why and i don’t know to solve this. I need an alternate way to find out alternate way. I got my solutions from your post. Currently i am using Share this plugin in my blog http://www.techredeem.com
Thanks.

Sharing buttons definitely have their place, but I find that meta tags are often overlooked — what’s the point of having your viewers share your webpage if it’s going to look so-so on the social website? Sure, there are some SEO plugins that offer rudimentary social meta tags, but none go far enough, IMHO. That’s why I wrote WPSSO. You can be sure that your article, product, video, etc. will look it’s best when shared — no matter *how* it’s shared. 😉

Great article & nice work, Please can you tell me what plugin directly publish my post instantly to my all social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LikedIn, Stumble etc.
No matter either it is Premium or Free version…

SMM is best part of Effective SEO. Now a days SMM called Social SEO and it is the best way to make brand any Business. The popularity of WordPress is increasing day by day. To best Social SEO wordpress needs a best Social Share Plugin. And for the reason about 99% WordPress site Social Share Plugin. But all are not good. Some is really better then other. I fund all are Best Social Share plugin in this page. Thanks for sharing the helpful information among Worpress Guys.

Joe Bigtime
September 2, 2014

I’ve heard a lot of bad things about Add This. Installs spyware, and you can’t remove it once it is installed…

Japleen Pasricha
September 8, 2014

What plugin is this site using? The one on the left hand side. Please tell me the name of that plugin. Thanks!

Anyone simply updating without paying much attention is apt to wind up with extremely spammy ads on their sites like “Congratulations! You’re the 100,000th Visitor” (Remember those horrible animated gifs? Yeah…)

Hopefully you can update the article to mention the ad nastiness they are putting on sites now.

Share this has currently 101 one-star reviews and only 111 5-star reviews. Reading a one-star reviews shows a really gloomy picture of the plugin stealth activities – i think it’s worth checking the reviews prior to recommending the plugins on the ET blogs.

A full ecosystem with dozens of Share Add-Ons delivers Mashshare. I build this plugin because there are hundreds or thousands of different Social Sharing tools but none of this are looking or working consistently. So for Social Sharing optimization you could give the free Mashshare Plugin a try.

Great list, thanks for sharing it. I was looking for a new plugin to replace my current one (just called “Sharebar”) as it hasn’t been updated in over 2 years and my current WP theme interferes with it.

Personally I like Monarch & ShareThis. I use them in some of my blogs. They have nice look and nice option. But I use Jetpack in my all blogs to automatically publish my content of Social Media sites. It is really awesome.

Is there a plug-in that won’t slow down the site? We had to disable our newly installed Monarch when we did our eblast. Suddenly our site took minutes to load.When we disabled it the problem stopped. Now we’re searching for a good plug-in that won’t affect our speed. Advice?

Nick Roach
January 27, 2015

Did you set up Caching within the plugin, and do you have a cache plugin installed for WordPress? These two combined should work wonders.

i was looking for some best social media sharing plugin and i find some great plugin for my website. nice sharing of plugin for people who using the wordpress.

Jenn
February 20, 2015

I just checked what I was using: Super Socializer – Do you have any opinions on that one? Also – I have Jetpack installed, should I deactivate Super Socializer and activate sharing on Jetpack instead?? Would love any opinions/help! Thanks!

I face a lot problem on Cache issues and I am not getting , how to make that board active of subscription which comes as somebody arrives on the site. You also have that function. It will be good if you help.

Monarch is very elegant and quite cool looking i have seen on most of the websites, I am using Shareaholic and Addhis together nicely working. Very good list of the social sharing plugins. Thanks for sharing.

i used to use the WordPress share this plugin , but with the look of things i shall start using the Monarch sharing plugin, please i would like to know the plans and pricing if there is any , and if there is non , i need a direct download link.

Great list of social media sharing buttons’ plugins. I’ve used many of such WordPress plugins, but none of them really satisfied my needs. Recently, I installed Sociable and sure as hell loving it, and its designs. Great plugin. Anyways, thanks for sharing this post. I’ll check out the others you’ve mentioned above.

I need a floating plugin which supports up 100 social sites please suggest me some working list

Karan Bhagat
May 24, 2015

Hey Kevin, you have presented a great list of best social media plugins of both free and paid ones.
Monarch is the only plugin by elegant themes which is there on every list and why not it is such a good plugin to use.
I personally like”Addthis” plugin only for floating social bars, it indeed provide a lot of social channels to share on.
This may add some more plugins to your wonderful list (for those who want to use free ones only) :-http://www.gobabygo.in/best-social-media-plugin-for-wordpress-free/

I have started using yoast on my site ( http://www.networkbooks.co.ke ) after reading recommendations from peoples comments here and I love it. People should try out.

tori
December 3, 2015

Hi, I use a floating one and it doesn’t work well. Sometimes I cannot see the number of shares on some of the buttons (I have Facebook, Pinterest, etc.). If I switch to another one would it start over at zero, or count previous shares?

Thank you for such a detailed and excellent post. Please could you suggest a great plugin for “Beautiful looking FONTS”?
I would also like to know the specific plugin for the font you are using on this blog.

I don’t know how I missed to check this helpful post. This is what I really searching for my new blog. Actually, I wanna go with 2 or 3 (Free plugins) as I don’t wanna invest in sharing stuff (As of now). Thanks for presenting this valuable post for WordPress users 🙂